I’m sometimes asked (today by email, for example) how historically accurate the Icelandic sagas are thought to be. The answer is: pretty damn good. The information in the sagas matches up well not only with other historical records (the Landnamabok or Book of Settlements, the Gragas law code, etc.) but also with the physical and cultural geography of the island: farm homesteads are where the sagas say they are, named individuals are buried where the sagas say they’re buried, and so forth. (Moreover, wherever the authors of the sagas did perhaps embellish the record, they would presumably have made the society seem more violent than it was, not less.)

Today’s query reminded me of a particularly striking example from a 1995 Scientific American article which I’m pleased to see is now online (it wasn’t the last time I googled it). It’s by Jesse Byock, author of numerous works on medieval Iceland, and makes a case that even an apparently fanciful detail in Egil’s Saga turns out to have a foundation in fact. Check it out, and see also this followup.

1. More about my Krakow trip soon (really!). But in the meantime, here’s the Spooner paper I gave at the Krakow conference. It’s also the paper I’m going to present at the Molinari Society meeting in December.

What Mind Is. From our point of view mind has for its presupposition Nature, of which it is the truth, and for that reason its absolute prius. In this its truth Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as the ‘Idea’ entered on possession of itself. Here the subject and object of the Idea are one – either is the intelligent unity, the notion. This identity is absolute negativity – for whereas in Nature the intelligent unity has its objectivity perfect but externalized, this self-externalization has been nullified and the unity in that way been made one and the same with itself. Thus at the same time it is this identity only so far as it is a return out of nature.
(Philosophy of Mind § 381.)

1750. This work is demonstrated not only from the nature of things, but from the undoubted experience of the Chinese under their first Founder Fohi, and his illustrious successors, Hoam Ti and Xin Num. Added to this dissertation by way of notes from the other philosophical works of Mr. Wolff, the principles and definition he refers to in this dissertation. Due to the age and scarcity of the original we reproduced, some pages may be spotty, faded or difficult to read. Written in Old English.